Making Newspaper History

Mexican Upstart Challenges Union's Grip On Circulation

November 14, 1994|By Colin McMahon, Tribune Staff Writer.

MEXICO CITY — Since beginning publication almost a year ago, the Mexico City newspaper Reforma has lived up to its name. Everything about the daily, from its full-color front page and splashy graphics to its policy of staunch independence from the people it covers, departs from the history of newspapering in the capital.

Now Reforma is taking on the almighty Union of News Vendors. The newspaper accuses the union of being a monopoly, an enemy of free commerce. And it claims the right to sell its product where, when and for what price it wants. This, observers say, may be the pioneering newspaper's most radical notion yet.

A long-simmering dispute over control of Reforma's distribution blew up two weeks ago, when the union stopped selling Reforma at its thousands of kiosks throughout Mexico City. Reforma workers-from the publisher on down-responded by taking to the streets themselves to hawk the paper.

The union says it has history on its side. Reforma claims the future. For now, their battle tells a lot about Mexico's quest to be a lean, open, international competitor.

For years, Mexico's government has used the vendors' union to control publications that step out of line. A newspaper with a negative story about the president may get put aside so the vendor is always "sold out." Or a magazine finds nearly every issue returned unsold with the message that the public just didn't seem to go for that latest "bad news" cover story.

"It's very hard to sell well when your salesmen don't want to sell," said Alejandro Junco, Reforma's president. "It's especially hard when it's your salesman's job to control you, a job they have done very well."

This time, however, the fight between Reforma and the union is not about politics. In fact, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari issued a statement Tuesday supporting Reforma's right to sell its papers-a sign that the government is willing to relinquish yet another form of political control as it strives to further open Mexican society.

The 20,000-member union, which hawks all of the more than two dozen newspapers published in the capital, claims that Reforma's practice of cutting the price for home subscribers is unfair to its members because it reduces the number of papers sold on the street. It wants to distribute newspapers equally among its various vendors, despite target marketing of clients like Reforma. It opposes Reforma's plan to put vending boxes around town-another innovation in Mexico. And it resents that Reforma, unlike most other papers, publishes 365 days a year, even on holidays that union members are supposed to have off.

Reforma says that's just business in the new, free-market Mexico.

Junco has publicly downplayed any social significance of the dispute. But privately, he paints Reforma's fight as symbolic.

"We have presented this as a free-trade matter between two mostly private groups because we did not want to politicize it and make it a big freedom of the press issue. That has its own pitfalls," Junco said. "But the bigger issue is that we as a country cannot be successful ... unless we are organized correctly.

"I can't deliver my newspapers unless I go through this BS of a union. This makes my company dependent on a very weak link. And every company in Mexico is like this. Every company has a weak link somewhere."

Ricardo Tirado, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied the country's newspapers, said the news vendors' union is widely seen as a vestige of Mexico's past.

"This dispute is not about freedom of expression; it's about money; it's about control," Tirado said. "The union is seen as a monopoly that must be broken up. And if any newspaper would fight it, it would be Reforma.

"Reforma can win because it has the resources, the power, the fame," Tirado said. "In only a year of existence, it has won a prestige that other papers with many years could only hope to have."

Reforma debuted last Nov. 20, Mexico's Revolution Day. The plan was to publish four sections and have a circulation of about 30,000 by the end of one year. Already, Reforma publishes 10 sections. And its pre-boycott circulation of 73,000 puts it among the top five largest dailies in the capital.

Junco acknowledges that the boycott has cut sales by about a third. But he anticipates making that up by the end of the week and, by next week, selling more papers without the union than Reforma did with it.

He hopes to do that by setting up his own distribution plan. In the first week of the boycott, Reforma's reporters and columnists, as well as some opposition lawmakers and sympathetic volunteers, took to the streets to sell the paper. But Monday, Reforma started hiring unemployed people to help out. By the end of the week, the paper hopes to have hired 4,000 workers-Junco calls them "micro-entrepreneurs"-to sell the paper for a couple of hours each morning.